52 Six-Million-Dollar Man

As we walked back to the main house, I put my arm around Torstyn. “Hey, buddy. I thought you said this wasn’t your fight.”

“Yeah, I changed my mind.”

“Just like that?”

“There was some persuasion involved.”

“From Cassy?”

“No. From Grace. You know, she’s different from the Grace I remember.”

I smiled. “I know.”

“Is she a human or a computer now?”

“Yes,” I said. “How did she persuade you to help us?”

“She let me know that if I didn’t help you, she would shut down our cartel’s entire network—every phone, every computer—then drain all our accounts of billions of dollars.”

“You believed her?”

“She gave us a little demonstration. She crashed the phones and computers in my office. Then my printer began spitting out a list of all our offshore accounts. She had all of them.”

“She is persuasive.”

“But she didn’t stop there. She said that if I didn’t immediately accept her offer, she would track my position by satellite and publish my real-time whereabouts every five minutes on the internet and on the computers of all my enemies, including every rival cartel leader in the world, the DEA, and the Peruvian government.

“To show me that she could, she pulled up real-time video of the president of the United States washing his hands in his private bathroom outside the Oval Office.

“I have a six-million-dollar bounty on my head. I wouldn’t last five minutes. I figured if I was going to die anyway, I’d rather do it helping my friends than get plugged by some two-bit bounty hunter.”

“Good choice.”

“I thought so. But after I agreed to help, she began to help us. She told me where Hatch had stored RESAT equipment; she set us up with Cassy, who was already on her way down; and she gave us the precise location of where we would find you. That girl can multitask like no one else.”

“You have no idea, my friend,” I said, smiling. “So now that you’ve entered the light side, what are you going to do?”

Torstyn shrugged. “I don’t know. No matter what I do, I’ll forever be a wanted man.”

I smiled. “Maybe not,” I said. “I have an idea.”